According to Young (1998), some of the key challenges of managing multicultural
teams are related to how people relate to each other, how they communicate with
each other, and differences in their cultural orientations. Iles (1995) observes that
misunderstanding, stereotyping, lack of competence and contribution, and mutual
blaming create conflict and tension in teams. He goes on to add that such issues are
likely to be multiplied when working with people who are culturally different and
when working with gender, racial, ethnic, and ability diversity (Iles 1995). The work
of Shenker and Zeira (1992) highlights the fact that cultural differences can contribute
to increased conflict and misperceptions, which results in poor performance. Brett
et al. (2006) sum up the major challenge in multicultural teams as follows